198 points

Wtf is this headline? When this guy dies you put the GMT he died at in hours, minutes, seconds. Not “85”. Respect.

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91 points

Better to represent it as a 64-bit unsigned fixed-point number, in seconds relative to 0000 UT on 1 January 1900. It’s how he would have wanted it.

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40 points

Not 1970?

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68 points

No. 1970 is 0 in Unix time. The NTP RFC specifies 1900. I had to look it up!

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39 points

Epoch comeback!

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12 points

ArsTechina is not what it once was sadly. Still one of the better news sites but that would have been something you would have seen 10 years ago

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2 points

And to think we want to abolish leap seconds because they are ‘too hard’.

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164 points

This is it. The original pioneers of the net are starting to leave us. I hope we can take care of their baby as well as they did.

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52 points

We didn’t. It has become a stinking pile of layers not even organizations worth hundreds of millions can put together anymore.

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46 points

We’re already fucking it up. Facebook and Xitter exist.

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17 points

On a more positive note, Facebook and XFormerlyKnowAsTwitter are not essential parts of the internet. You can choose to not use or care about them. It is much harder to not use NTP, and it’s great that it is an open and comprehensible standard 👌

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9 points

Not fucking it up, it’s already fucked up. The internet is a dumpster fire.

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2 points

And everyday is getting worse.

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132 points

Shit. That thing is supposedly hard to understand.

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49 points
*

Very. And he was going blind, too. I read a marvellous interview with him not too long ago, I’ll see if I can find it.

Ah, here it is: https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-thorny-problem-of-keeping-the-internets-time

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18 points

Wow! What an interesting read about someone I’ve never heard of, but whose work has impacted daily life in so many ways. Its amazing how many systems rely on accurately telling time and the intricate solution that NTP is.

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13 points

https://archive.is/2fw9A With no paywall. Thanks, what an interesting read!

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2 points

Thank you for the link to the interview!

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19 points

Dang. NTP is that, isn’t it

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10 points

image magic

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14 points

The Internet would not collapse without images. Usability would be bad in many cases, but it would still work. Now imagine your clients don’t know the time and cannot verify if a certificate is still valid?

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5 points

Hard to understand but at least there’s multiple implementations other than ntpd, like Chrony and systemd-timesyncd.

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84 points
*

To paraphrase Churchill “Never was so much owed by so many to a single man”, NTP has been a critical aspect of XXIst century, from making highly complex clusterized systems work reliably to saving you the pain of adjusting the clock in your smartphone. If you have used even a single networked electronic device for a millisecond in your life, you owe the man some thanks.

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17 points

XXIst

I’ve been seeing this on Lemmy lately, why are people going to roman numerals? Do we hate Arabic now? It’s not saving keystrokes unless I’m crazy?

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14 points

in certain parts of the world they really ingrained in us that roman numerals are the proper way to do it and it’s very hard to shake off, apologies

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1 point

Romanes eunt domus!

:P

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64 points

Network time protocol protocol

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25 points

ATM machine

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2 points

Ass to mouth machine works!

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22 points

PIN number

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4 points

Network time protocol, man.

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1 point

RAS Syndrome

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